Join the Hype: Half-Life 2

What could cause me to break months of silence? Erm, a video game actually. Doing nothing to dispel my geek-bound reputation, I just had to join the chorus of excitement about the recently announced Half-Life 2.
To be honest, I wasn't all that excited about the game when I first heard about it. I wasn't playing first-person shooters when the original Half-Life came out in 1998, but I bought the game last year (cheap) so I could play this Counter-Strike thing everyone was talking about. I never even played the actual game, just the Counter-Strike mod.

But after watching the 25-minute, 600MB demonstration video from the E3 convention, I was totally hooked. The graphics, physics, characters, AI, and gameplay of this game are simply way beyond anything that's currently out there, or on its way. So now, I dutifully join the legions of other geeks in anxiously awaiting it's Sept. 30 release.

Until then, there's of course the mandatory fansites for us all to lick of the tiniest scraps of rumours and news in anticipation of that fateful day. The forums at www.halflife2.net seem to be the most active HL2 online community, and are the best source of truth and rumours about the upcoming opus.